Tech & Biz

Time Top 100 Most Influential People Poll: Hacked

by Jordan Yerman | April 19, 2009 at 09:55 am

2876 views | 24 Recommendations | 3 comments

Time Magazine's Most Influential People poll got hacked. I suppose it was only a matter of time. The hask involved inserting spam URLs to trick voters into promoting someone other than whom they were intending to support.

A few h4xx0r malcreados were able to reorder the list, and promote the founder of 4chan to the number one spot. By the way, if you don't like flaming, snark, and NSFW weirdness, do not click on that link. You've been warned.

According to an inside account detailed by blogger Paul Lamere, members of the 4chan website exploited weaknesses in the web application that Time used to record reader votes. As a result, moot, the 20-something founder of 4chan, tops the list, which Time bills as "the world's most influential people in government, science, technology and the arts."

Just as Ellie found a Message embedded in PI, we find a Message embedded in the results of this poll. Looking at the first letters of each of the top 21 leading names in the poll we find the message “marblecake, also the game”. The poll announces (perhaps subtly) to the world, that the most influential are not the Obamas, Britneys or the Rick Warrens of the world, the most influential are an extremely advanced intelligence: the hackers.

The hackers kept it simple:

According to Lamere, the hack involved two perl scripts. The first located the highest-rated person in the poll who wasn't one of the desired 21 winners and voted the person down. A second program made sure that each of the 21 names were rated in the proper order. In all, the scripts comprised less than 200 lines of code.

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René

at 14:09 on April 19th, 2009

Oh, dear, do you think 4chan is messing with NowPublic's ranking and stats?

ChrisPrato (not verified)

at 08:51 on April 27th, 2009

I think everyone involved is an idiot. So a bunch of kids get a hold of the Time influence list, and list the guy that let them hold free internet forums. That might be who they think is most influential, for all we know. Let it be. They voted, maybe that will help them as they grow older, and the website won't mean as much as their next president, and they will be able to apply what they learned into a different atmosphere.